


Silence

by Nimravidae



Series: Echoes in the Aftermath [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Freeverse, Horrorterrors - Freeform, Mentions of Rosemary but nothing too concrete, Post-Game, slight depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-28
Updated: 2014-03-28
Packaged: 2018-01-17 08:04:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1380094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nimravidae/pseuds/Nimravidae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is far too much silence after the game for Rose, not when her whole life was was founded on the screams of the Horrorterrors. She copes with silence, musing late nights in the arms of her lover.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Silence

Rose hated the silence. 

She didn’t hate silence, no she basked in it. She loved the cool darkness of silence drifted around her as she read. She loved the blank nothingness that suffocated the oxygen from her lungs. She loved the poison in her veins, in her air and her world that tasted so purely like silence and cyanide. 

She hated the silence, however. 

The being a definite article. It wasn’t silence in its entirety that she hated, because that was something that someone could grow to love. It was something that could be ‘rolled with’ if her brother were to explain it. But once the game was over, once darkness lifted and the light burned her extra senses blind, Rose Lalonde realized she’d never heard silence before.

Always, in the faint drifting’s of her mind there was chattering. No… not chattering.

Screaming.

Crying.

Incoherent wails of long deceased and inhuman creatures reaching for her and slithering their appendages into the crevices of her consciousness. The slick tentacles forced their way up her throat and into the breaths of vomit she spewed to counteract was silence was, what silence felt like. Since she was a child their cold breath panted at the back of her throat, icy claws raked their way through her silvery-blonde hair.

It was never silent, even when words were outlawed and her breath was stilled by a blade in her heart. They just screamed louder when she didn’t breathe. When her skin turned to ash and her eyes to flame they took control and they never left her. 

Until now. Now it was deathly silent, even at her own death in the game it was loud but now it was disgustingly hollow. She felt it, deep within herself something missing. Some chuck tore from her flesh with claws as she stepped over the barrier and their voices left her mind with a ring. There was no more screaming. No more voices.

No more.

None.

For a while following, while they were re-building lives on the other side of the door, Rose simply felt empty. She was left without the sight of a Light Seer, without the voices of her Horrorterrors to endlessly haunt her. Three years she had them, now they were gone.

No – not three years. Three years they bellows and shook her being with their forceful cries. She had them for sixteen. Sixteen long, painful years.

Thirteen saw them quiet, like small suggestions in the back of her mind. Speak now, hold your tongue. Talk to him, do this say this. Look at that pretty Grimoire. 

Then three.

Three years on a flying hunk of space rock and they were her company in long drunken nights. Whispering secrets of death and agony into a bleary mind, telling bedtime stories of what true fear was while she lie in the arms of her lover.

She still did that now, Kanaya’s grey arms twining around her slim middle as Rose simply stared at the ceiling. She did that a lot now. Stare and accept the lack of noise around her.  
She missed them – she realized, with a bitterness in her own head. She missed their lullaby’s of pain, their plays of torture and songs of affliction.

She missed the way they spoke, in hissing slurred languages ancient beyond belief and completely incoherent and unable to be understood even by her. They had become soothing, a reminder that she was never quite alone no matter where she was. They were watching her. They were always watching.

Now?

Now the darkness pressed at Rose and her lover from every angle, the shadows in the ceiling looking more like distorted daydreams than reflections of light. Lavender eyes blinked a few times, watching them cross and dance in a tango she could never begin to comprehend. She wondered idly if that was what the noises were in a more personified version. Idle creatures wandering her subconscious, making their marks and shifting without a single thought. Before the light rose and they vanished, no proof they were there to begin with.

She shifted to get a proper look, but the arm around her waist stopped her, a soft noise of complain from the jade-blooded troll in her bed made the argument apparent. Rose was not to move because Kanaya would much rather have her there. She did tend to chase away the night-terrors that sopor slime used to tend to, so Rose couldn’t do much to complain. 

She settled back against her lover, cheek pressed against shoulder and tore her gaze from the shapes on the ceiling and instead let her eyelids flutter shut.

She realized that, perhaps with the beating of a heart beneath her and the steady breath of a lover, she would never truly caught be the silence she feared.


End file.
